Les Ateliers Volants is a great initiative from my friend PYR to teach music and music creation using computers. Modern software offers tremendous capabilities to dig deeper into what the sound is made of, assemble it, observe it, tweak it, visualize it. The students are not limited by their instrumental and score reading abilities.

Quite naturally, HighC is a tool of choice within les "atelier volant"'s repertoire. It provides faithful representations of complex audio landscapes, that are easy to grasp and manipulate. Many exercises have been designed using HighC as a support.

Les ateliers volants offer students of all ages the ability to conceptualize and visualize better the audio and perceptual phenomena that form the basis of music. As a result, students stand on a firmer ground to deepen and structure their hearing, master music theory and the principles of audio synthesis.

I am open to other music pedagogy initiatives using HighC. Drop me a note if you teach music and are interested in using HighC in your classroom. I am also preparing a course outline with many lively exercises which I can make available to anyone interested.

On December 19th, I conducted a field survey of HighC usage in the classroom with les Ateliers Volants.

The goal is to assess current uses of HighC for educational needs, find out weak points and potential improvements of the software, and will eventually lead to a curricula, or at least guided exercises and teacher's material for computer-aided music teaching.

In one 3 hours sessions, 5 15 years old students practiced various listening and creation exercises. Most exercises consist in hearing an example file and trying to reproduce it in HighC, helping students recognize patterns such as kinds of harmonic progressions, effects such as echo and chorus. In the process, they also learn how to create these effects and can come home with a small creation of their own based on the material of the exercises.

This type of exercises can be declined to teach many music concepts, such as harmony, rhythm, audio effects, synthesis, and eventually leads to the basis of composition.

We intend to further elaborate on all the stuff we (les ateliers volants and myself) can learn from this kind of collaboration.